is not lost on me.
Nor on my friend,
Terry Conley.
He was driving down the road
in Gary
looking for a gas station.
He got shot in the head.
His sister and cops think
it was gang initiation.
funeral,
Emma Gonzalez led a gun control
tribunal.
She marched millions of kids
against gun violence.
It started with Parkland.
It continued today with
Emma’s silence.
She cried quiet to the camera
for six minutes and 20 seconds.
That’s how long it took to kill
17, injure 15, and send the nation
into a gun control tailspin.
Kids cried,
held each other.
Kelly, the sister,
wept discreetly.
So did her mother.
They asked me to help,
put out the reward.
“You’re on the radio,
for crissake.
That’s gotta be worth
something.”
I don’t know if it will help,
or if Emma will stop crying.
If I told you I just bought a gun,
would I be lying?
Yesterday I drove to Nativity of our Savior in Portage for a funeral mass for Terry Conley. He died on Jauary 4th. It was such a horrific situation that it took a couple months to bring everyone together.
According to his sister, Kelly, he was driving down route 12 by the train station in Gary and someone pulled up and shot him in the head. It may be a gang initiation. The priest at Nativity of our Savior called it a “stray bullet.”
Either way, I saw a lot of people from days gone by. Jeff Wulf, Steve Sevald, Mr. and Mrs. Conway. Mrs. Sakula. John Gyure, Roxann Paulson and Mr. Paulson. There were more. There was a lot of shaking heads and looking down. Terry had a really big heart.
After that, Alexis and I went to the 60th birthday party for Phyllis Malo. She’s been a nurse at St. Margaret’s in Hammond for a long time. We used to be neighbors. Her husband, Tim, worked at John’s Pizza in Cal City for a long time. His mom worked there for more than 40 years. They were like part of the Bacino family.
On Friday night, I emceed the Purdue Northwest Coaches Show from Buffalo Wild Wings in Hammond. First, I intereviewed head softball coach Niki Stansell and a couple of her players, Holly Pagan and Sammie Miller. Softball is benefitting from the closing of St. Joe’s College in Rensselaer,. Since it closed, athletes don’t have to sit out a year when they come to play sports at Purdue Northwest.
Halfway through the show, head baseball coach Dave Griffin showed up with his players. In the first game ever in division II GLIAC action, they beat Grand Valley State 3-2 on a walk off. Dave and his players were pumped. I interviewed Dave and players Larry Crisler, John Cory and others.
You could go watch the video. https://www.facebook.com/WJOB.1230/videos/1772117299500561/
It’s about an hour long. Twenty minutes into it, I said – “all right, folks, we’re going to take a short break….”
I got stopped in my tracks. Producers Ben Cowert, Jimmy Mullaney and Nick Hedrick waved their hands wildly.
“There are no breaks. You gotta keep talking.”
Yikes. It may not look like it on the video, but without the ability to go to a commercial, you’re working your ass off. It’s like being at a party and having to keep up nonstop small talk for the whole night. It’s okay as long as you can belly up to the bar and take a breath or go into the bathroom and check your phone. But forced to stand in the middle of a party and talk without a break, you’d weary, too.
I wonder if the producers did it on purpose. They usually set up spots to play during broadcasts. I shouldn’t complain, really, in that I showed up five minutes before we went live. Assistant athletic director Rob Huizenga had put together a nice packet of notes and possible questions, and I hadn’t reviewed that, either. About a half hour before air time, I started getting texts –
“Where are you?”
“Are you coming?”
“You better get here soon.”
In the end, I’ve been doing live broadcasts, off and on, for 33 years. If I don’t have it down by now, I’m never gonna get it.
Today, there’s another birthday party and I have do work on a final project for Marketing class. As soon as our group finishes this on Thursday, I’ll set my sights on employing what I’ve learned this semester.
The first step is to develop a Strategic Marketing Plan. We’ve never had one. What segments of the market do we want to go after? What products should we offer? At what price? Whom should we target? What should our positioning be?
If any of the three or four of you are a marketing person, you recognize key words.
Segmenting, Targeting, Positioning. These words keep running through my head. I didn’t ever think that there was an actual science to getting out there and selling your goods. I thought it was all grit and hard work, cold calling and putting together proposals. I thought you had to talk people into buying your stuff.
It turns out that if you have a decent product, you can almost let it sell itself. As long as you put together a strategic plan and go through the laborious routine of segmenting, targeting and positioning, you can increase sales. Imagine that.
That should do it for now. I just wanted to check in with the three or four of you on a Sunday morning. We’re not to the 1,000-word threshold, so here’s something I wrote the other day.
Sometimes I think about all the
mistakes I made.
I’m old enough to know better,
but I don’t feel that bad about
everything. I know I should.
A spider crawls across the bathroom
floor while I sit and sh--. Kill or be
killed, mu------er, You die.
I sh--.
Through it all there has been a
desire to live apart from things.
I crave solitude like you wouldn’t
believe.
I want to run across the
moon in my underwear, looking
for a sassafrass root. I want to go
underwater and watch women
jump off the diving board.
Every once in a while a bikini bottom
slips down.
I was once lying in a room in Berkeley.
The whole world was in front of me. A whole
life of craving to live alone,
to scream to nothing.
More blue than pink, it’s here
before you think. The trick is to
what?
The trick is to what?
I’d like to say that after all these years
I have answers. But I don’t. I know
how to write a workable poem, do a
radio show, read a map, put a few
chords together on a guitar.
I might know how to love. I forgot
that part. Love broke me up. I was
gonna roll down sand dunes
naked and alone, in the heat
and in the
cold.
Instead, I am growing old in the
cozy confines of love. I have nothing
to complain about. Kisses, strokes,
hair, caresses – She and I are one
being rolling around in what used
to be swamp. If you dig a couple
feet down, there’s water.
We have everything.
I set out to be alone.
Here I am waiting for her
to
come
home
from work.
Here she is. Woman, I’m sure that
I love you.